


try to remember, forget (dead bird)

by HATECADILLAC



Category: Vocaloid
Genre: Androgyny, Animal Death, Developing Relationship, Drama, Extended Metaphors, First Dates, Flashbacks, Gender Confusion, Grief/Mourning, Hate Crimes, Hospitalization, Hurt No Comfort, Memory Loss, Mortality, Nonbinary Character, Other, Past Violence, Symbolism, Trans Female Character, Transphobia, Understanding, Unhappy Ending, don't mind me! just projecting and posting cringe, or can alternatively be read as
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25007974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HATECADILLAC/pseuds/HATECADILLAC
Summary: A dove hits the window of Kiyoteru's classroom.
Relationships: Hiyama Kiyoteru & Kaai Yuki, Hiyama Kiyoteru/Kamui Gakupo, VERY vaguely implied past gakupo/lily
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	try to remember, forget (dead bird)

Kiyoteru did not actually see or hear the bird hit the window, though he understood that it happened—that space was blank within his head, as so many things were nowadays. He _did_ hear the response, first out of context: the screams of his students, shuffling of chairs to make a move towards the left side of the classroom, hushed shocked murmurs once the initial scare had died down. It made his head spin, words dying in his throat where he’d started explaining the requirements of their upcoming project, and all he could think to do—ridiculous as it was—was call on Kaai Yuki where she sat at the front of the room with her hand raised diligently and a stony expression on her usually so cheerful face. Kaai Yuki, whose name he had taken to writing on his hand after she told him he was her favorite teacher and he realized he could not remember it—seemed to steel herself and straighten her little shoulders before informing him of what had happened. “Mr. Hiyama,” she started in a quiet voice, which was so oddly cool but wavering just slightly at the edges with the fear of a child, “A really big pigeon just hit the window.”

“Oh.” 

He didn’t think anything of it, forgetting what it was like to be a kid, but it was obvious soon enough that going back to teaching would be difficult. The students murmured amongst themselves, worried, small voices with words he could hear but not understand. Clearing his throat did nothing to draw their attention back, nor did rapping his knuckles on his desk, or even ringing the bell—that got them to look at him, but he could see that same worry and distraction etched across every expression, and with an involuntary sigh he let go of the rest of that day’s class. It was serious for them, then. For a long time all he did was look out over them, small and weirdly helpless, in silence.

“Do you think the bird’s okay?” A girl who wore her hair in long pigtails every day piped up eventually, a girl who’s name occupied the blank voids of Kiyoteru’s brain. That group worry seemed to permeate her voice even more profoundly.

“Well, it’s hard to say—” he started, but was quickly overshadowed by the loud voice of another student, a tall and abrasive boy who had made Kaai Yuki cry last week. Things like that stuck out in Kiyoteru’s head, were easier to make sense of and remember.

“We should go check on it!”

And he was a popular kid, apparently, because soon enough the agreement and the pleading started up completely out of Kiyoteru’s grip.

“Yeah, yeah!”

“That’s a good idea—”

“Mr. Hiyama—”

“—Please?”

Then they were finally all quiet, and all looking at him. What other choice did he have? Especially when it was Kaai Yuki who had asked _please_ , who looked up at him along with all the others. Kaai Yuki, whose favorite teacher at Nishiido Elementary was Mr. Hiyama, even if he was kind of weird and could not remember things. He himself tried not to pick favorites among his students, but, well, it’s always easy to simply give back what’s received. As well as easier to think fondly of the one student whose name and face you could routinely remember. 

So with another sigh, Nishiido Elementary Fourth Grade Class 3-A began their field trip down from Mr. Hiyama’s room on the third floor and out onto the blacktop in search of their poor bird friend who’d had an unfortunate accident. The kids seemed to be in _remarkably_ better spirits as they went down the hall, rushing ahead and chattering animatedly to leave Kiyoteru holding up the back of their scattered roving pack. It was Kaai Yuki who hung back, who frowned and tugged on his arm to get him to look down at her still solemn and frowning face.

“Mr. Hiyama,” she said with the cadence of an adult who is talking to a child, rather than the other way around. “Are you worried about the bird?”

Kiyoteru blinked, caught off guard. “I suppose just as much as the rest of you are,” he eventually non-answered, “why do you ask?”

“Because you look upset,” Kaai Yuki explained in passing—satisfied with her answer, she half-ran, half-walked ahead at a quick and awkward pace to group up with the girls who Kiyoteru assumed if not remembered were her friends. She had been right, but Kiyoteru had only just realized it himself, the worming dread starting to boil up in his stomach as though she had put it there by her words. But it was a dread that was familiar to him; not because of the bird at all, though the walk towards the bird he and perhaps he alone knew would be dead had only served to amplify it. A dread that he could under no circumstances manage to explain to a nine-year-old, one which he could hardly explain to himself, even after all this time. It had been, what, three years now? Frowning to himself, alone in the back, he was forced to, in his vague and fuzzy way, remember.

—

_Kiyoteru had been a new teacher then, fresh out of school with only six months or so under his belt at Nishiido. The middle of the school year, his first school year. And he or she—Kiyoteru had lost that name, too, and refused to look at the one news report where he knew he would find it again—had been the single father or mother of twins who had transferred into his class. Kiyoteru could not remember if they had been a girl and a boy, two girls, two boys, and it hadn’t seemed to matter then or now. Right, it was him or her who had made him think less and less about things like that, until he or she was gone and the space that thing had once occupied became not comforting but alienating._

_All Kiyoteru knew of him or her at first were the whispers—there were always going to be whispers about a person like that, after all. Everyone is threatened by a person who cannot be known by seeing, who is not pinned down. This didn’t ever seem to bother him or her; on the contrary it was as though he or she relished it, fed off the energy and confusion he or she generated simply by existing._

_The first question, the innocent one, was of his or her relation to those strange and quiet twins, who spoke only when spoken to unless it was amongst themselves. After all, he or she looked nothing like them, scrawny and blonde-haired as they were, though he or she insisted when asked that they were his or her own by blood. Which of course begged the follow up question of the identity of their mother—or, their father—the other one, in any case. Where she was, what had happened to her. Or him. At the core of everything was the question more all-encompassing and more mistrusting, the threat of ambiguity he or she carried everywhere he or she went. If he was a man, his hair went too long down his back, his wrists and ankles were too delicate, his walk swung with too much hip and not enough arm. If she was a woman then her voice was far too deep, her shoulders too broad, her stature too tall and imposing. Clothing choice was no indicator either—skirts and off-shoulder tops at the bake sale, dress shirt and tie at the PTA meeting, sundress to the school festival, on and on in contrary patterns. People did not know what he or she_ was _, obsessed with that reductive question, only that he or she was doing it wrong, was bad at it. A threat, then, in failing to do the thing that most or all people do without a second thought to it._

_Kiyoteru, on the other hand, fell in love._

_At first he had interpreted it within himself as just a fascination, the same fascination that everyone else must have held if one free from the distrust that lay underneath. After all, he himself had always been bad, too, at being a man (though he had never thought about it that way until he met him or her). Some mistranslation that had occurred, perhaps: that he was always scrawny and inoffensive, failing to assert himself, afraid of boys and even more afraid of girls. There had at that point been more concrete memories of cruelty from others in his school days, struggles to date in college, but those external things were not so much a part of it as it was something_ inside _of him. Some benign misalignment that had gone unnamed, unnoticed, up until that moment. But he hadn’t been afforded the same biological leeway as he or she had—Kiyoteru knew, sharp jawed and board-chested as he was, that he was a man, even if it was something that had happened to him and not something he had decided. So maybe it was jealousy, then, in some vague and undefined way._

_But then they’d started talking—first about the twins, tense and worried conversations on his end about how withdrawn they both were—but soon spiraling out into what were ultimately little more than excuses to make conversation on paid school time. The twins, after all, had always been like that, he or she had assured Kiyoteru with a smile that had made him feel like a high schooler again. It was natural for them. And somehow that had become the lead in for Kiyoteru to ask the possibly offensive question, the question he or she must have gotten more times than he could possibly count:_

“Are you...well…?”

_He could not manage to say it entirely, embarrassed not so much by it but by himself for asking it. But he or she had known, and laughed—refused to answer—and his or her eyes had flashed, just for a second, with what was an understanding, recognizing something about Kiyoteru that even he had—at that point—failed to recognize about himself. He or she was much more interested in why he wanted to know, and Kiyoteru did not really have an answer for that: that he was curious, maybe, in more ways than one. Because he or she was unlike any person Kiyoteru had ever met before, and he didn’t think he would ever meet another person like him or her again, and would carry that in his head for a long, long time. He tried to say all that in about as many words, awkwardly as ever, and he or she had laughed once again. A sound that rang through his empty classroom like a bell, that seemed to fill his body up with something not unlike hot water that had him boiling up just the same. A sound that told him that his strange and indeterminable feeling, his cliche of lonely-young-teacher-pining-for-hot-single-mom-or-dad was not as pathetic as he’d once considered it to be, because the feeling was mutual._

_It was a sound he would come to hear again and again and again, and grow more fond of each time._

—

The bird wasn’t dead yet when Fourth Grade Class 3-A found it, twitching pathetically with its legs in the air for a long moment before falling still into the subtle but unavoidable dark smear of its blood on the dirt and leaves around it. That was the worst option, Kiyoteru thought, for it to die in front of all of them—he could only imagine the email to the parents he would have to write today. He could see it in the eyes of all his students, which never once strayed from the bird’s body, and watch the difference in the shine of them alongside its last sad breath.

It also wasn’t a pigeon, as Kaai Yuki had described so decidedly to him—it was actually a mourning dove. Why _that_ was something his brain had preserved, considering everything it had thrown out, was beyond him. It felt like a big joke in the most horrible way: _Get it, Kiyo?_ Mourning _dove? Hahaha!_

He suddenly had to swallow back an unexpected amount of saliva, thick and anxious in his mouth as he kept looking down at it. He, too, could not seem to pull his eyes away after a little while, entranced by this fragile thing and the context of its blunt, almost comic end.

“Is it dead?” Someone in the back asked, though it was obvious, even if from the silence among them and not the sight of the bird itself. It was more out of the fact that, as the adult present, it was Kiyoteru who had to confirm it, staring out over a sea of little heads that all looked up at him in expectation of hearing the thing they must have known, even if they were children. And so he suddenly felt like an imposter; after all, in that moment, he was as small as they were, and knew just as little. But he was the adult, and he could not let that agreement slip out of his grasp—he owed it to them. He cleared his throat before addressing them, back straight like he was in his classroom and not out in the elements, under the sun with the wind ruffling his hair and clothes and the crossing guard looking across the blacktop at him with a benevolently perplexed expression.

“Unfortunately, yes. It seems as though the bird did not, um, survive hitting the window.” Stiff and awkward, but this was in his defense something that had never been covered when he was getting certified to teach. How are you even supposed to be the person who explains something like that to twenty-five odd fourth graders? At least they seemed to get it well enough, uncharacteristically quiet, thinking about it to themselves. And they thought about it for a long while.

“But it’s so pretty,” someone said—a kid whose face Kiyoteru could not see and whose name he did not torture himself to try and remember. He hid it as well as he could from them, as their teacher, but it struck him like an arrow, that phrase. As though it did not add up, that it could be so beautiful, and still die. And it _was_ a pretty bird, even like this, somehow. All at once he wanted to break character, to let his shoulders slump and his speech go casual, and agree with that kid. _You sure are right, buddy. It_ is _pretty. Things like that shouldn’t happen, not to something that pretty. But, you know, the real kicker is, that’s how it goes on this awful, fucked up Earth, kid. Pretty things die and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Not a thing_ anyone _can do about it, matter of fact. Except God, maybe, if he exists. But at the same time that would make him the one responsible in the first place._

“What are we going to do?”

That was Kaai Yuki—in the front of the group as always, frowning up at him, looking the most affected. He had an answer in his mind for what the logical thing to do would be—to leave it there, go back and finish class, leave it be as a strange and horrible thing that just happened one day. They could all sort it out in their individual therapies, when they were older and screwed up by it, and blame him there. But instead he turned around, bent at the knees and picked the bird up; first for himself, to feel the inconsequential weight of it in his hands, the softness of its feathers. Something he could do for himself to make things tangible, a trick he had been taught in the hospital for making memories stick (though he suspected, already, that this one would stay). Then he turned around to face the class again, like he was presenting it to them, and when he spoke it was rougher and more _himself_ than he could remember being for them in a long, long time.

“Where do you all want to bury it?”

—

_Their one sweet night together, out of the classroom, off school grounds, went almost in reverse from what would be normal—they started out in bed. They didn’t have sex or anything; Kiyoteru set that as a hard boundary for himself a long time before, so he could pretend he wasn’t being as non-professional and sort of creepy as he knew he was (especially given the fact that he was at his or her house, and knew the twins were sleeping in their room unawares just down the hall). In fact they did not even kiss, not even once, not even innocently. They lay together, fully clothed, on top of his or her blankets, and held each other, talking quietly about everything and nothing. Whatever came to mind, and endless flow of consciousness, digging into one another's thoughts and feelings with the long spoon of a child digging into an ice cream sundae. He or she, after all, had discovered and understood something so profound to Kiyoteru and so secret even to himself. It was unsaid, but it permeated their every interaction, their every word to one another._

“Kiyo,” _he or she had said, breath hot against his ear, the nickname foreign and dizzyingly neutral. No one had ever given him a nickname before._ “You are so beautiful. I don’t think you know but you are so beautiful.”

 _And no one had ever called him_ that _before, either—he had been_ handsome _a handful of times, by his grandmother or college girls who thought he would not date them, but never_ beautiful _. Not once. It made him cry before he could stop himself, and he or she noticed, but did not say anything—just held him tighter. Let him, or dared him to, speak for himself._

_It took him a long time to work up to it, in silence, held, so when he said it it sounded out of context. On the very contrary it was the thing he had rotated in his mind for so long, longer than he could remember, and had only just put words to, had only just then crystalized so clearly. Still, he stuttered the words out, like they were choking him._

“I have always—thought about—what it would be like—to be a woman. To not be a man. To be—anything else.”

_He or she squeezed him tight, as though rewarding him, but did not say anything for a long while, too. Thinking about it, Kiyoteru supposed. When his or her question came it was soft and soothing despite how loaded it was._

“Then why haven’t you ever tried it?”

“Tried what?”

“Tried being anything else.” _His or her eyes were bright and confident, and Kiyoteru knew the meaning of the words:_ Why haven’t you ever tried to live like I live?

 _And there were more reasons for that than he could even imagine saying, earth-shattering to even think about. Because he was scared, perhaps, was the obvious first one. That it had never occurred to him before meeting him or her, that that was an option. Because he could still stand it, being a man, even if it wasn’t on purpose. He could live that way and make it okay, or could have, before he’d learned he didn’t have to. But the thing that came out of his mouth was the reason that had snuck up on him and made him struggle to catch a breath for one moment, the reason that linger immediate and physical where everything else was a philosophy. The one that was too simple and too painful to consider._ “Because—I would lose my job.”

_And all that made him do was cry again, harder, and ask with his body to be held._

_Once that was over—not a second before—he or she rolled out of the bed and left Kiyoteru there, forced him to sit himself up and look at him or her with a sniffle and a question in his eyes. It was answered in part by the fire that had taken residence in his or her own expression, the face of a man or woman with a plan._

“Try it,” _he or she prompted, stance steady, one masculine-feminine hand on one undeniably male and female hip._ “I have clothes and a wig you can wear. I’ll even do your makeup. Then we’ll go out. You can be...something else. For just tonight.”

_Despite the fear that poked him at the base of his spine, primal and on association, he had rubbed himself so raw that there was no way he would refuse. Not when the idea that had been off-limits for so long was now here and real, and not when it was him or her offering it up, enabling. His body was getting him off the bed before his mouth could even form the words to agree._

_So he was built—was dressed, made-up, fit with a blonde wig that seemed to make him the inexplicably missing piece of the twins. Made over by him or her, which felt so intimate, and so embarrassing, as though it were the most revealing thing he had ever done or ever could do. When it was over, he looked at himself in his or her full-body mirror and found that he was entranced, for the first real time in his life, by his own image. He had not won the same genetic lottery as he or she had—was still rough around the edges, in the thing that had happened to him—but he had_ crossed over _in some can-of-worms concept of the phrase. Perhaps now almost-woman rather than not-quite-man. Unusual, frightening in its newness—but he was entranced still. If not because of looking ‘good’ or ‘not good’, but because he looked real. Looking at himself like that, he could imagine looking that way the rest of his life. It would in fact be_ easy _: to let his hair grow out this length from his own scalp, to wear these kinds of clothes, to correct people that the kanji of his name was not Kiyoteru but its other reading Suzumi, cool-beautiful, neutral._

_That was the inside-joke name he gave to anyone who asked, that one sweet night: the teenage barista at the cafe they sat at, the man on the other end of the phone who took reservations for the restaurant they would eat at next weekend, the woman at the train station who had needed money for a ticket and had told Kiyoteru that he was a sweet girl, that he was such a sweet girl. And he thanked her, though he was not certain whether or not he really was a sweet girl, or if he was something sweet that he did not have the vocabulary to express the existence of. After it happened, the two of them didn’t speak about it, but he or she grabbed his hand and did not let it go for the rest of the night, giving him a knowing smile like Kiyoteru had, for one moment, gotten a taste of what it was like to live that life._

_Their tour of the city genderless was so good, too good, for so long and too long up until the very end. In a bar, their last stop, where they were looked at for the last time. They had been looked at plenty of times already, drawing eyes, the same confusion-tension he or she must have gotten so frequently now cast on Kiyoteru for the first time. Adrenaline provoking, and sometimes frightening, but somehow intoxicating all the same, that he was looked at and thought about, that no assumption could be made. There was a private and close-to-heart pleasure in it, underneath all of that. But when Kiyoteru had been looked at then, on the sidelines, by the men who had approached him or her seeming to assume one thing and feel cheated, all there had been was fear. He had felt it the second they made eye contact, their two opposing groups, but was frozen by it, gears turning too slowly to figure out what was happening in time to stop it from happening. They were being looked at again, but this time had not escaped categorization—skipping, in the minds of those men, beyond male or female and directly into_ freak. It wasn’t going to happen any other way _, he tried to chastise himself both in the moment and afterwards, but he hadn’t really believed it. Not before then._

_There were no emotions involved in his memory of how any of it actually went—nothing had stayed but the objective, and even that was blurry and unreliable. Shouting, confusion, attempt at deescalation—on the ground, a boot to the head—a switchblade unseen for so long, too long. Kiyoteru remembered trying to intervene, but scrawny and inoffensive as he was, failing to assert himself, he had accomplished nothing. He had accomplished nothing, and no one else there had helped them, had turned their eyes away or found excuses to leave. He remembered being shoved aside harder than he would have thought possible, into a wall, and then nothing, sinking deep into the black with little but the dull and rapidly-fading sensation of so much half-recognized pain in his head._

_Although, thinking about it more, perhaps he was actually thrown not against a wall, but instead through a window._

—

Nishiido Fourth Grade Class 3-A stood in two solemn rows as they watched their strange teacher, Mr. Hiyama, dig a hole for the bird next to the school garden with the shovel he’d broken into the supply shed to access. They must have known it was against the rules—he feared they knew that it was really for himself, and not for any of them—but the only sound that permeated the suddenly thick air was that of metal scraping against dirt.

When it was done, he sighed and wiped the sweat off his brow from his exertion (remember, he was scrawny and inoffensive), picked up the bird once more, and lay it to rest; gently as he could, which was easy, given it was so light. So much lighter than anything else buried and given a grave, but difficult for reasons beyond physical. He looked down at it, dwarfed by dirt, and did not begin the process of reburying it for quite some time. Just looked down, and his students mirrored him, though they could not have known why. 

He cleared his throat and asked if anyone had something they wanted to say. No one did, and he didn’t blame them—would not have expected them to, in hindsight. Whatever prick of embarrassment and self-consciousness it engendered in him was quickly wiped out by the stronger embarrassment of being an adult seeking comfort or some form of validation from children. Kaai Yuki raised her hand and asked if she could sing a song, and Kiyoteru let her; they all listened to her with a silence that was half revering, half simply accommodating. It was a familiar song, something Kiyoteru was sure he’d heard on the radio one or two years ago. Maybe three. He did not put effort into searching his scattered brain for the name, and just listened.

He expected them to walk back to class with him once it was done, start talking amongst themselves, but in one fluid motion their gazes drifted, in unison, from her and up to him. Like it was his turn to sing now, or at least say something. And he knew he _should_ say something—this was, after all, likely a moment they all would not soon forget, what was for at least some of them the primal importance of the first knowledge of death. He had an idea of what it would be, too, but it threatened too much at his throat, burning.

 _But you’re the adult_ , he reminded himself, though he did not feel it in the slightest. _You’re their teacher. It’s your job to explain_.

“Class,” he started to address them, and all at once his voice broke, and he felt hot tears strike iron at the corners of his eyes. But it would have been impossible, to cry in front of them—not possible.

—

 _In many ways he was lucky, he told himself time and time again. Lucky that the kids he taught were young, took ‘Mr. Hiyama has to be in the hospital for a little while’_ _at face value and did not poke around to find out why. Lucky, too, that he found out the last person he had given cool-beautiful neutral Suzumi to was the police officer who showed up on the scene, too late to do anything but preside over the removal of their two bodies and frown scribbling onto a clipboard. He didn’t remember doing it, or why he would have done it—maybe just scrambling to keep Suzumi alive, hold onto the idea and keep it real even as it got carried off by sirens and red-and-blue lights. So in the single third-page news article describing the incident, the pitiful crossdresser who got beaten up but really should have known better was then Hiyama Suzumi—a common enough last name, of no relation to the Nishiido fourth-grade teacher who carried the same burden of it. She—or at the very least, not he—was the second casualty that night; Kiyoteru had against his will been spared._

_He had come to the hospital alone and knew he was alone—did not need anyone to tell him what had happened to him or her. It was always going to happen to a man or woman like that, to a person like that. Kiyoteru told himself that and still didn’t believe it. Maybe because he or she had avoided it, and been so happy, for so long._

_So all there was to do was recover, even if it felt selfish. As best he could, his three weeks of drinking vegetable broth through a straw and wishing he was dead, though it was clear that some things would not be the same again. When Kou came to bring him the cards the students had all made for him, wishing him_ get-well-soon _or_ we-miss-you _, he had wept over each one as he held it in both hands like a fragile butterfly. Not only because he was realizing, concretely with all the facts for the first and only time, that Kamui Gakupo had died. It was also because with dawning horror and shame he was reading each name and failing to put a face to it, no matter how hard he tried._

_His return to school was subdued and anti-climatic, the haziness and unreality of a life after death. It was embarrassing to be a teacher who could not remember his students' names, who would write a fourth-grade level math problem on the board and find himself unable to solve it himself, but he survived. Parents took more of an issue to it than any of the kids did—they thought it was funny. They didn’t know. But adults seemed to know, and he often panicked about how much they knew, but he never received the consequence he spent the first year afterwards looking over his shoulder for. That was the one thing he had managed to let go of, after all this time: that anyone other than himself would know the thing he had learned, and now could not do anything with._

_He had the twins, at least, in some repressed and awfully Victorian take on the whole affair. It did not seem to change them much, only that they became quieter, if such a thing were possible. But they had left at the end of that school year, and he had never seen them again. They had to be thirteen now, going on fourteen, and he wondered if they were still the same—if they were still doing what had once been called natural for them, or if they had grown out of it. On the last day before summer he had met their scowling, blonde haired mother, and he wished he hadn’t. After all, upon finishing the logistics of their meeting, she had looked up at him with dry eyes and said, plainly and out of context to any other person:_ “Everybody knew something like that was going to happen to him someday.” _Her presence solved the mystery that Kiyoteru had been so desperate to preserve the sanctity of._

 _When he received his third complaint from a parent, something about a missed test grade entry or an incorrectly filed attendance record, he had been asked to meet with Principal Megurine and he’d had nothing to say for himself. She had nothing to say to him for quite some time, either, before she sighed and put her head in her hands to run her fingers through the thinning pink strands of her hair._ “Teru,” _she finally sighed, frighteningly casual—a new nickname, unneutral, that he hated—_ “I think you’re a really good guy.”

_You’re a really good guy._

_You’re a really good guy._

_You’re a guy—_

—

The obvious metaphor was that Gakupo was that dead bird—after all, he ( _or she_ , Kiyoteru still clung to) was dead just the same, was buried in a family plot Kiyoteru did not know the name on and would never visit. But Kiyoteru knew, more nuanced, that it was really himself. He had hit the window, too, maybe three years ago, maybe the day that he was born scrawny and inoffensive. Maybe he hit it every day, forever saw the world strange and unwelcoming through the glass of it that rested on his face. But he had not died when he hit it—remained smashed prone there, stared at by fourth graders who did not fully know what they were seeing—and he could not tell anyone. Otherwise he knew he would be cried for, or maybe laughed at.

“Class,” he started over again, forcing his eyes to dry, forcing out the rest of his words—he could conceive of it in the fractured phrases he would use to tell parents what had happened, sure, he could picture _that_ clear as day. _Dear 3-A parents...as your child may or may not have already told you, today an incident occurred in which...this was an unfortunate accident which was out of the hands of anyone affiliated with Nishiido Elementary...your child may reach out to you expressing fear or upset, or you may wish to have a conversation with your child about…_

But it would mean nothing to a little kid, the same way it meant nothing to him, the same way that it was one more thing that happened to him and that he had no stake in one way or the other. When his lips managed to move it was almost on accident.

“Sometimes bad things happen for no reason.”

There was more to it than that— _had_ to be more to it than that, for them, for him—but it stuck there. The words vanished into the depths of his now useless brain, away in the past three years ago, out of reach for him. His students just looked on, oddly horrified, having been told the thing they should have been allowed to discover for themselves, when they were older. They seemed to understand the intensity of it. Kaai Yuki began to cry.

What positive spin could he put on this? What meaning was there to derive from this thing, the bad thing they had all seen without their consent? He was their teacher—how was he going to teach them? As though his tongue had shriveled up and died in his mouth, there was nothing else he could say to them, no other explanation he could give, other than that sometimes bad things for no reason.


End file.
